Cillian Murphy Performs a High-Wire Act in Brooklyn, in ‘Misterman’

ByBarbara Chai

Pavel Antonov

Cillian Murphy as Thomas Magill in “Misterman”

When it comes to Irish actor Cillian Murphy, much has been made about three things: his blue eyes, his “chameleonic” ability to play both angelic and villainous roles, and his possible return as Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow in the Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

(a. Enough has been said about his eyes. b. As he demonstrates in his new play, “Misterman,” he can inhabit both angel and villain in the same role. c. No comment on those Scarecrow rumors.)

In person, Murphy comes across as just a regular guy, and I mean that in the best possible way. He’s staying in Brooklyn while he stars in the electrifying one-man show, “Misterman,” which opens tonight at St. Ann’s Warehouse, located on a Belgian-blocked street between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges in DUMBO.

On the day we meet, Murphy is wearing a scarf and sweater with skinny jeans and black boots. His hair is short and tousled and he has a light beard for “Misterman.” But for his Irish accent, he could be mistaken for a resident of Brooklyn.

“The atmosphere here is so nice and a lot of my friends have migrated from Manhattan to Brooklyn,” Murphy, a London resident, says in an interview in his dressing room. The blue suit he wears in the show is hanging from a clothesline. “So it seems as you get a bit older and have kids and stuff you want a slightly more chilled-out pace of life. That seems to be the atmosphere here, which suits me because I’m at that stage of my life.”

Murphy hasn’t left Brooklyn since he arrived with his family one week ago from London. In fact, he hasn’t left the theater much, since he’s been hard at work on “Misterman,” a show that lasts one hour and 20 minutes, in which Murphy constantly moves from one end of the wide industrial stage to the other, inhabits multiple characters and must enact a number of physical feats. By the end, he seems to have given the performance everything he’s got.

“You make this contract with the audience when you go up there,” Murphy says. “You know that you’re sort of subconsciously saying, look guys, I need you to come with me on this. I’m going to work my ass off, and I need you to concentrate.”

With “Misterman,” playwright and director Enda Walsh (author of “Disco Pigs,” which launched Murphy’s acting career 15 years ago) has constructed a complicated retelling of a single day in the life of Thomas Magill. Over the course of the play, we meet various residents of the fictional town of Inishfree – all played by Murphy or through voices on reel-to-reel recorders – as we synthesize the day’s portentous moments.

“Enda makes the audience work for all of his pieces,” Murphy says. “You have to keep up, in not only the language but the staging of it and the construction of his plays, which I love because it means you’re actively engaged in it, not passively sort of just observing.”

At this point in the interview, Murphy crosses the dressing room to prepare “a good Irish tea” because he’s on the tail end of a cold (it probably doesn’t help that in one scene of “Misterman,” he’s drenched in water). He asks if I’d like a cup, and then he hurries downstairs for milk. He drinks his tea the Irish way, with milk; I drink mine the Chinese way, without.

Back upstairs, he rushes to his seat again, encouraging me with a smile to continue. (Apart from being very polite, Murphy also smiles easily.) I refer to Walsh’s introduction to a new collection of his plays, in which the playwright – who also acted in “Misterman” himself – writes: “As much as the writer is always ‘on,’ I needed to find ways of disappearing and allowing the character to just be.” Does Murphy feel the same need when he performs Thomas?

“Yes. Yes,” Murphy says definitively. “It’s a play about immersion, not only for the actor in the role, but Thomas is actually immersing himself in this day, recreating this day in his life.”

In the performance, he inhabits Thomas, who in turn adopts the voices of six neighbors in Inishfree. For example, in one scene, Thomas visits a young man in a garage. Murphy alternates registers to play both their parts, and manages to capture both their laughter in a shared joke. Thomas also interacts with reel-to-reel recordings of various voices, and Murphy must physicalize each encounter, be it with man, animal, or the ghost of either. “It’s very interesting because you’re an actor, playing an actor, who’s playing other characters,” Murphy says. “There’s quite a few layers going on and that’s a wonderful challenge. We were always very clear about that, to make it look like he’s just doing it. It takes a lot of rehearsing.”

Pavel Antonov

The play premiered at the Galway Arts Festival in July, and between then and now, Murphy kept going back to the play to keep it fresh. “It’s amazing the room you can find in your brain for this stuff,” he says. “I think you must delete a lot of other old files to make room for this new file.”

What he already knew deeply was the setting and vernacular of a town like Inishfree, which he describes as “an everytown in Ireland. They’re basically a road with a few shops, and it’s on the way to somewhere else.” Murphy grew up in Cork, but his father is from a farming community and his mother is from a small town. Also, the “eejit,” or “idiot,” character of Thomas is well-known to the Irish, he says, as is the religious fervor that consumes him and, in Thomas’s case, compels him to commit certain acts. As much as Murphy’s Thomas rages with fury, he tries to divine hope and goodness in his community.

“What’s lovely is that people really feel for him on that journey, and I really feel for him,” Murphy says. “You want him to be all right but the problem is he’s just on the fringes of society and nobody is there for him.”

The show is demanding in all respects, and after it’s over, you wonder how Murphy can muster up the resources to do it all over again. “It’s like a race, when you’re in the race, you’re just in it,” Murphy says. “I’ve always loved roles both in film and theater that challenge you physically and psychologically.” After each performance, it may take him a little while to shake off Thomas. “You get hugely adrenalized with it,” he says. “I should when I finish the show go home to bed — you can’t because you’re still buzzing. So I sort of wander around, talking to myself,” he says with a laugh.

But he says he’s not complaining. “I love it. Like I love– I wake up every day going ‘Yes! I’ve got to do the show.’ It’s not a burden, it’s a complete joy, you know?”

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